s/v Taia is for sale

Fully-equipped cruising boat. Read on for some history and detailed specs.

Asking price: us$75,000

Location: Green Cove Springs, Florida

Taia is a 1980 Morgan 461, a solid cruiser that cruised the East Coast of the US and the Caribbean Sea with a family of four from July/2013 to August/2016. She was safely stored on the hard at RAM Marina in Rio Dulce, Guatemala, from September/2016 to April/2017. She is now on the hard at Green Cove Springs Marina, Florida. Before 2013, when she was known as Liberty, she cruised the East Coast and Bahamas, crossed the Atlantic, and spent a few years in the Mediterranean Sea. She's an experienced boat and fully equipped for cruising!

We have sailed her over 9500+ nautical miles, anchoring in roughly 200 different places. She is safe both underway and at anchor. Her sloop rig is easy to handle, with 2 reefs on the main and a jib on a furler. The spinnaker pole, mounted on a track on the mast, is trivial to deploy for the jib or the symmetrical spinnaker. Easy sail handling for any point of sail.

Every porthole and hatch, as well as both companionways, has screens that keep the bugs out. Three big hatches and three small ones provide excellent ventilation with great air flow through the cabin.

We know this boat inside out and will be happy to help her new owners get settled in and familiarized with her systems. Every piece of hardware on the boat has its manual, most in both paper and digital form. There are spares on the boat to keep her sailing safely for the next few years, with a detailed spreadsheet containing the entire inventory of parts and their location in the boat. We also have a detailed log of every mile sailed during the last 5 years, so you can get a good idea of what the boat is capable of doing.

Contact us at: ernesto.novillo@gmail.com

Boat Specs

Material: Fiberglass.
LOA: 46 feet.
Draft: 6 feet.
Displacement: 30,000 lbs.
Sloop rig. Main sail with 2 reefs (the sail is ready for a 3^rd reef), furling jib, symmetrical spinnaker on snuffer, spinnaker pole on a track.
Engine: Perkins 4-236, 85 HP. The engine has 4700 hours and purrs like a kitten. Hurth HBW-250 transmission.
Diesel tanks: Two tanks totalling 130 gallons will give you around 120 hours of engine time.
Water tanks: Two roughly equal size tanks totalling 290 gallons.

Sails

Heavy dacron main sail, with 3 reef points.

Heavy duty dacron jib on Harken furler.

Symmetrical spinnaker on snuffer and tack system that fixes the tack around the furled jib. It can also be rigged traditionally with the spinnaker pole.

ATN gale sail. New, never used.

Navigation Instruments

• Raymarine ST60+ wind, speed and depth instruments. They're connected to a SeaTalk to USB converter box that allow us to see the data on the computer at the nav station.
  
• Garmin GPSMap 527 chartplotter.
  
• W-H P-3C autopilot with fluxgate compass. Taia's steering system is hydraulic. This autopilot controls a hydraulic pump that easily keeps the boat on track. The system is simple and performs flawlessly, even in big, confused seas and high wind. We were completely spoiled by this autopilot and have done several passages of a few hundred miles without touching the wheel.
• ACR Nauticast-B AIS transponder, connected to the chartplotter. We see boats on the chartplotter up to 15 miles away, long before we see their lights. Also, they can see us, which makes night sailing much more relaxed.
  
• Raytheon Pathfinder SL70 radar/chartplotter.
  
• Holux SiRF Star III USB puck GPS to connect to computer at nav station.
  

Electrical Systems

Taia is energy self-sufficient with renewable sources. As a backup to power generation, she has a 100-Amp alternator and a 5.5 KW diesel generator.

Our family of four uses roughly 200 Amp-Hours a day, including making around 20 gallons of water a day with the 12-volt water maker, and two 12-volt refrigeration compressors (one for the refrigerator, another one for the freezer). The solar panels and wind generator are perfectly capable of producing more than 200 Amp-Hours a day. And for those rare stints of no sun and no wind, the generator can easily charge the batteries.

All the lights aboard Taia are LED's, including all cabin lights, navigation lights and anchor light. We have a photosensitive anchor light on the arch that consumes about 0.3 Amps. It turns on at dusk and stays on till dawn. After installing that light on the arch, we stopped using the anchor light at the top of the mast.

House bank: 8 Deka ProMaster GC25 6-volt batteries totaling 920 Amp-Hour capacity. New in November/2014.

Solar panels: Two 270-Watt, 24-volt panels controlled by a Morningstar Tristar MPPT 45 controller. The panels bear the brunt of the generation. New in December/2013.

Wind generator: Silentwind 400 W, with its own controller. New in August/2015.

Generator: Next Generation Power 5.5 Kilowatt diesel generator powered by Kubota engine. The generator is installed in the engine room and is started/stopped from a button on the 110-volt electrical panel. The generator has its own hour counter, which marks 1346 hours.

Alternator: 100-Amp alternator.

Charger/inverter: StatPower ProSine 3.0 with Advanced Control System panel. 3000-Watt inverter.

Shore power: Two 30-Amp connectors and cables.

Battery monitor: Link10 monitor that keeps track of production/consumption of Amp-Hours, as well as battery voltage and current.

Navigation Table

Taia's nav station has all the necessary equipment for safe sailing. In it you'll find the following gear:

• Furuno Navtex receiver.
  
• Standard Horizon VHF with DSC (new in 2014), with RAM in the cockpit.
  
• Old Garmin GPS128 as third GPS back-up.
  
• JVC stereo with Bluetooth, USB connector for iPod/USB stick (there are 4 Bose speakers on the boat, 2 in the saloon and 2 in the aft cabin).
  
• Icom IC-710 SSB radio with PACTOR modem. The modem is equipped with a serial/USB control cable to connect to a computer. With our sailmail subscription, we were able to send and receive email at sea, including GRIB files and other weather data.
  
• WiFi router connected to Bullet and WiFi extender antenna.
  
• USB hub with data cables coming from solar controller, PACTOR Modem, SeaTalk to NMEA0183 converter box (so you can see wind, speedlog and depth instrument data on the computer), and puck GPS.
  
• MorningStar Tristar MPPT 45 solar controller (controls input from two solar panels of 270 Watts each).
  
• Silentwind wind generator charge controller.
  

Deck Hardware

• Ideal V3C electric windlass with buttons on deck. This windlass, along with the 30-Kg original Bruce anchor and 130 feet of 5/16” chain have provided at least 3 years of safe anchoring in all sorts of conditions.
  
• Secondary anchor is a 75-lbs CQR.
  
• Fortress FX-23 anchor on a bracket on the stern rail, ready for deployment in an emergency or to point the bow into the swell in rolly anchorages.
  
• Anderson 52 self-tailing winches for jib and spinnaker sheets.
  
• Harken 16 self-tailing winch with rope clutches to allow sharing between main sheet and furling line.
  
• Harken 16 self-tailing, 2-speed winch for halyards at mast.
  
• Dinghy davits.
  
• Atlantic Towers aluminum arch to hold solar panels and wind generator (new in December/2013). The arch is also used to reinforce the davits and as a crane to hoist the outboard before long passages.
  
• Dodger and bimini, including full enclosure for the cockpit. The full enclosure makes autumn sailing in the East Coast very comfortable; the cockpit remains at a nice temperature and the crew stays warm.
  

Dinghy

Walker Bay Super Light SLRXH 310 hypalon, 10-foot long. This RIB has a flat floor, making it easy to move around while boarding, and has 2 drainage gutters and a third gutter down the centreline that keeps the fuel line flush with the floor. We bought the dinghy new in September/2013.
Propulsion for the dinghy (besides the oars, of course) is a 15-HP, 2-stroke, Yamaha outboard bought new in May/2014. This is the most reliable outboard there is and finding spare parts is easy anywhere in the world. It runs without issues.

Refrigeration

Taia has big top-loading refrigerator and a big freezer. Each of those is cooled by its own 12-volt Sea Frost compressor with electronic speed-controlled thermostat and thermometer. The system was installed in May/2013 and runs like it was installed yesterday. The compressors can be switched between air-cooled and water-cooled. We normally run them water-cooled because it's more efficient, but when Taia is on the hard it's great to still have a refrigerator and a freezer.

Watermaker

We installed this piece of kit in May/2015 to spoil ourselves majorly. It's a Spectra 200T Deluxe capable of making 8 gallons/hour. It's frugal in power consumption and we run it almost daily for around 2 hours. Our rule is that nobody goes to bed with salt on their body, and the watermaker allowed for 4 showers a day, plus all our drinking water, dish washing, and cooking.

Living Space

The v-berth is currently partitioned with a piece of fabric to separate our two kids' bunks. Aft of the v-berth, there's a shelf locker and hanging locker to port and the head to starboard. The head has a shower and an electric toilet.

The saloon has a big table to starboard and a settee to port. Aft of the saloon there's a big u-shaped galley to starboard. The galley has the refrigerator and freezer, a Force 10 stove and oven, and deep double sink. At the sink there are 3 faucets: one for raw water, one for fresh water from the tanks, and one for filtered water from the tanks.

The nav station is to port, opposite the galley.

Outboard of the passageway going aft there are two bunks which we used to store gear most of the time. Inboard of the passageway is the cavernous engine room with the engine, generator, refrigeration compressors, and Raritan water heater that runs both on 110 volts and off the engine cooling water. The passageway opens up to a huge master cabin with a desk bigger than the nav station and a king size bed (yes, you read that correctly: Taia has a king size bed in the master cabin, made up of two single size mattresses placed side-by-side). There's a 26" LED TV in the aft cabin for those rainy days or family movie nights.

There's plenty of storage space under every surface and a huge cave of a locker under the king size bed.

There are two 16,000-BTU reverse cycle air conditioners on board, one just aft of the v-berth and the other one in the master cabin.

All the interior upholstery was redone in July/2016.

A lot of photos follow, but it's easier to see them in the photo album.